


somewhere beyond the bitter end is where I want to be

by hypotheticalfanfic



Series: and the dog bites down a little harder [3]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Daughters, Disappointment, Gen, Mathematics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-21 15:31:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6056797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reboot daughters, a trio of short fics. This one's about Demora Sulu.</p>
            </blockquote>





	somewhere beyond the bitter end is where I want to be

She didn’t pull any strings to get the new Enterprise for her ensign assignment, but she can’t guarantee no one else did. Her father, though never a stable presence in her life, had long hovered in the background of events, smoothing her way when he could. Her mother chafed under it, hated the implied insult (her father meant no insult, Demora knew, meant only to apologize in his quiet way for being so absent), fought back by pushing her daughter in any direction but Starfleet. She wanted Demora to be an artist or a teacher or a Blessed Sister, anything but a ship jockey. The mathematics ruined that.

Demora’s father never expressed a preference for his daughter’s future. He so rarely expressed a preference about anything, and the few times every year that they spoke, he asked only the most benign questions. Most of the visits devolved into silence and sipping tea, not making eye contact. Her father wasn’t a cold man, but he wasn’t warm either. She knew on some level he felt sad that she had grown up without him, that he and her mother hadn’t remained married, that she called her stepfather Papa and called him Father.

When Demora was very small, he had given her a present every year for her birthday. Outsiders might have expected that his presents would be lavish, expensive, a way to try and buy her love. The opposite was true. She received a single present only, something practical and useful. It was also often beautiful, because her father appreciated the marriage of form and function like any good fencer. Her third birthday present had been an ancient Earth abacus, carved from a dark wood that was long extinct. Her father had, no doubt, meant it more as a toy than a tool - the rattling of the beads as they slotted from one place to another, the different textures, all good for a developing child. Demora never put it down if the holos of the next few years could be trusted. For her seventh birthday, he gave her a small violin, not the most expensive or renowned make. Just a violin, the right size for her. That, too, appeared in nearly every holo of Demora until she grew too tall for it and bought her own. It was around that time that the mathematics became a problem.

At school, Demora was encouraged to study at her own pace, as all the children were. The instructors tended to leave her alone, since she was quiet and well-behaved and generally seemed above average. When they did, that year, take a good look at her work, emergency calls rang to both her mother’s nearby hospital and her father’s other-side-of-the-galaxy quarters. It took some doing to get both of them on the screen, and after her instructors stammered through the explanation, Demora was never going to be anything but a navigator. Maybe an academic, later, but Starfleet wasn’t going to let her go without a war.

She was slotted, against her mother’s will and with no input from her father, into the Academy’s children’s program. It was, strictly speaking, for the children of current Starfleet Academy cadets and instructors, but here the silent, invisible hand of her father nudged things along without ever actually appearing. Her mother was offered far too much money to teach xenobiology, her specialty, at the Academy as an independent adjunct. Her mother, teeth gritted and anger pouring off of her, accepted, and Demora joined a class intended for pupils five years her senior. She performed solidly in other fields, but her mathematics, astrogation, and multidimensional cartography earned her handfuls of prizes, ceaseless recognition, and much honor, all of which she loathed.

“Mom _,_ I don’t want to be a navigator.” Twelve-year-old Demora Sulu sat facing forward. Her mother drew a comb through the girl’s long, straight hair. “I want to play the violin, or dance, or something else.”

“I know, _tamanegi_. I know you do. You can do those things, if you choose.”

“No, I cannot.” She sighed.

“You could.”

“Not really.”

A long pause. “No, not really. Someday, perhaps.”

Someday did not arrive for a long time. She continued to excel, to do justice to her father, to be quiet and well-behaved and not seem as though she hated every moment of her time. She was named an assistant on the USS _Hammurabi_ , a nearly retired Saladin-class destroyer with a wonky single nacelle. The doors made a strange low-pitched screech each time they opened, and the crew was small and tight-knit, and Demora never settled in. The other crew were lifers, and although she never said it, they all seemed to sense that she was there not out of joy for the work, but some other, more complicated reasons. Demora herself had never examined the reasons she stayed in Starfleet in any real detail. They didn’t matter. She had long known the path before her, the path that ended with “someday,” with a laying aside of a uniform, stepping back onto regular gravity-bound Earth, starting over. The path went through the _Hammurabi_ , around the USS _Navratilova_ , and had a long pit stop on the new _Enterprise_ , as if time was a circle, and flat.

“Demora.” Her father’s friend, the young Admiral, smiled warmly. He had never been anything but kind to her. The anger she felt at his presence was, she knew, unfair.

“Admiral Kirk, sir. Welcome to the _Enterprise_.”

“Jesus, that’s weird to hear. Spock!” He turned to Demora’s onetime virtual chess partner. “Look who’s here!”

“Ensign, a pleasure.”

“Mr. Spock, sir. I’ve missed our chess games.”

He crooked one side of his mouth into what passed for a smile. “As have I, although the win-loss ratio was becoming upsetting. For me, I should specify.”

“Your weakness for the old Vulcan openings will get you every time, sir.” She almost relaxed, just almost. The work itself wasn’t a problem. It was challenging in ways, and mathematics had become very soothing over the years. But this conversation was the first time in ages, it felt, that she had simply been a person, not the navigator, not the child prodigy, not the mathematics scholar who revolutionized something or other with a tenth-year paper she wrote half-asleep. The old _Enterprise_ had always offered her that, at least. There she had been remarkable not for her gifts but for her quick wit, her chess skill, her father’s easy laugh. Seeing him on the ship had been a revelation: this was the man her mother had loved, once. This sheepish, kind, honorable warrior. Not the quiet, shy, tentative man who sipped tea and didn’t speak in sentences.

She had never spent much time on the _Enterprise_ , the old one, just a few weeks over a lifetime. But it had welcomed her, body and soul. Wherever the path she was on might lead, it would never take her there, and for a moment she felt a yearning, near sorrow, at the thought of spending her days with her father, learning to be his daughter, on a ship that could almost pass for a home.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Useless Desires" by Patty Griffin
>
>> Somewhere beyond the bitter end is where I want to be / How the sky turns to fire against a telephone wire / And even I'm getting tired of useless desires


End file.
